Digital Beast Plus+

The zen garden was especially nice.

Nice little cyberpunk/sci-fi zone diorama. It has like, random orcs in corners for some reason.

It's rough learning to come to grips with the fact that my strengths are not aligned with my passions. I thought that if I kept gravitating towards what I was interested in, I'd learn it well enough to become competent. That was a very optimistic take. The world tells us that sheer persistence and perseverance will get us there, but that's simply not true. There is a stigma surrounding saying "I can't", but perhaps that's the harsh reality of some things.

After spending a good chunk of around 30 years trying to learn to do a thing, this may be the year I might have to finally throw in the towel and admit to myself that some things are not meant to be, and refocus my efforts elsewhere.

There's something about a hand-made world that just speaks to me.

Discovered Wynncraft last night, and it's quite a thing. A minecraft server you join, that's a fully-featured MMO with classes, raids, crafting, housing, dungeons... the works. Handcrafted world with some impressive tech and design, and a general sense of fun. (One of the main religions worships cows).

It has a lovely map on the website (and in-game if you install Wynntils), and actually plays very well. Big fan of Shaman totem slingshotting.

Not really, I don't think I have a 'one that got away' like that. I think ideas are frankly kind of disposable – if I've pitched something and it didn't go over, I am just going to forget about it because there's going to be a thousand other things pitched and discussed after it. I don't think working creatives tend to get super attached in that way, or at least I don't.

I can generally second this in that if you work on a game for any length of time you're going to have all kinds of ideas from silly and implausible to serious and infeasible and either you learn to move on frequently and love the next idea, and the next, or you become the kind of person that producers resent for constantly holding up the production schedule by clinging onto their babies

I think from the outside it's always easy to think of games as an immaculate construction where any deviation from the Original Ideal is a loss (esp because marketing loves to suggest that they ARE made this way), but they're a lot more like jenga towers that you build all the levels of at the same time and by the end there's probably going to be a bunch of pieces everywhere but it's fine as long as it stands upright

I can't even count the number of "oh that would be cool" ideas I've had in my career that not only came and went, but often went, and went, and went, and went until they were so far from what we were making that they no longer even made sense as a thing that we might want to include

In that sense idk maybe the only ones that truly hurt are the ideas you come up with right at the end, when something is fully formed and it's too late to change it

But you learn to get over that, too. Carry it over into next time.

I think so many aspiring armchair game developers would clutch their pearls if they knew how often things were made entirely out of sequence during game development.

More than once, I had to do full layouts for entire stages and basically 'finish' them, months before the game could even play them, before code existed to make enemies do their thing, before being able to playtest anything. So much of game development is eyeballing things, and hoping they come together at the end into a chorus rather than a cacophony. And making some minor corrections after the fact. You can't get too hung up on Golden Ideas in situations like this, since you simply don't know what the situation actually is until it's in the rear view mirror.

So you pitch small things, and sometimes a thing sticks! I made a dumb suggestion that "we need a loot goblin" and by god, it happened so fast, and next thing I knew I had to make levels for the dumb thing.

Wolf Knowledge rocks though.

My favorite thing about government services is when you are referred to the Glorpo department, who then tell you they can't serve you, so you're sent to the Dorpo department who also can't serve you until you apply for Bobis Support. But you can't apply for Bobis Support without a signature from Deebis Support. Deebis Support only takes appointments on Tuesday on a first come first serve basis, and after 5 hours of waiting they let you know they're out of appointments but the Deebis Emergency Support might help. Deebis Emergency Support sends you back to Glorpo department.

"The Place That Sends You Mad" is a location from The Twelve Tasks of Asterix. It is a maze-like, multistory office building founded on bureaucracy and staffed by clinically unhelpful people who direct all their clients to other similarly unhelpful people elsewhere in the building. It is unknown if "The Place That Sends You Mad" is the building's actual name, or if it has another.

Finding Permit A 38 in "The Place That Sends You Mad" is the eighth task Asterix and Obelix have to complete. They run from room to room and window to window filling out one form after another until Obelix goes nearly insane and Asterix asks about a fake permit from a fake circular. The building is thrown into chaos as the staff go mad asking each other for information about this permit, until the Prefect in charge of the place gives Asterix Permit A 38 to get rid of him. He then went insane when he realized he'd blew it."

Found this absolute unit of a 'wasteland' scenario. It's so massive my client could barely render a portion of it. (Last shot I removed the fog to see structure better). Great mood, insane detail. Loved the little area off the side where in-progress building was happening.

Cute goat.

So, back to Lynx then?

It was quite nice actually.

Every Saturday

Big fan of this stick figure neon t-rex avatar I saw, with little food neons inside it. Also liked the alien with a human in its mouth, and whatever the hell the last one is.

They really just load a webpage with an embedded emulator, and stream it to the screen texture, but it's playable.

a lot of "talking about what cohost is like" feels like the parable about the men touching the elephant